According to a recent survey, Danes are the happiest people in the world. This came as a surprise, writes Mathilde Walter Clark, to most of her fellow Scandinavians, who know very well the unhappier elements of their daily lives. The problem, she suggests, is that words like “happiness,” “ambition” and “contentment” have subtly different meanings in different languages -- in other words, happiness in Denmark isn’t the same thing as happiness in America. You could also read our own Emily St. John Mandel’sreview of the Danish writer Jonas T. Bengtsson’sA Fairy Tale.

Recommended reading: "One of the drillers fell to his knees. Some sobbed, in the way men do when their mothers die, or when their sons are born." An exceptional and deeply moving long-form essay in the New Yorkerrecounting the 69 days spent underground by the famed '33' Chilean miners buried in the 2010 accident at Copiapó.

“A lot of writers are big readers. Very often, when you’re writing your day’s work, something you write will remind you of something that you read. And the thing that you read shines a kind of light on the sentences that you’re writing. So I think it would be very hard to write without having read a great deal.” Listen to Salman Rushdiechat with Paul Holdengraber about poetry, film, and his latest project. Liam Hoarewrites on the implications of Rushdie’s fatwa.